


For King and Country

by feroxargentea



Category: Master and Commander - All Media Types
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-28
Updated: 2012-01-28
Packaged: 2017-10-30 06:03:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/328557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feroxargentea/pseuds/feroxargentea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Surprises hear bad news.<br/>Post-canon/AU. No particular spoilers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For King and Country

**Author's Note:**

> The characters belong to Patrick O'Brian and are borrowed with love.

The red cutter was returning from shore, ripples of phosphorescence swirling round the oars as they rose and dipped. Several Marines were perched in the bows, straining to make out sounds from the darkness, their muskets at the ready. Jack Aubrey sat with Bonden in the stern sheets. He was slightly injured, with blood oozing slowly from a wound where a musket-ball had winged his shoulder during a scuffle ashore; he and his men had gone too early and waited too long on the beach, until a patrol of militiamen had spotted them and unwisely attacked without sending for reinforcements. Dr Maturin had finally appeared, however, and been safely retrieved, and Jack did not give a farthing for the half-dozen Frenchmen who now lay dead on the sand.

Stephen himself was exhausted and abstracted, a silent bundle lost in a voluminous boat-cloak. When they reached the _Surprise_ , he submitted to the indignity of being lifted aboard in a bosun’s chair with none of his usual protests.

It had been ten days since a local fisherboat brought the Surprises a single British foremast hand, sick and shivering, pulled from the coastal waters where he had been found clinging to floating wreckage. His ship, the forty-four-gun _Alcmene_ , usually attached to the Brest blockade, had been blown far from her consorts in a great storm and then attacked by a French squadron, including the forty-gun _Flore_ , the thirty-two-gun _Pr_ _écieuse_ and the brig _Venteux_. The rescued sailor, badly injured and dehydrated, died before he had time to give a detailed account, and his narrative had in any case been confused and fragmentary. The fishermen, however, who were perfectly prepared to give information gratis as long as they were paid a gold guinea a bushel for their mackerel, had told Captain Aubrey that the _Alcmene_ , outgunned and hopelessly damaged, had struck her colours before being burnt to the waterline and sunk. They had heard that Captain Dundas had been taken alive, but knew nothing of the fates of the frigate’s other officers, who included Jack’s young half-brother Philip and twelve-year-old son George amongst the midshipmen.

Stephen had insisted on being put ashore to gather what intelligence he could, regardless of the dangers inevitable to one whose face had become too well known to his enemies. He had been gone for more than a week before a signal-light had been spotted and the cutter sent to fetch him off the strand.

Now, deposited back aboard the _Surprise_ , he waited shivering and uncertain on the gangway while Jack strode over to speak to Pullings and check the con. The lieutenant’s bawled orders were followed by the shrill pipes of the bosun’s mates and the swarming of hands up the hatchways and into the shrouds. Stephen stood awkwardly in the sailors’ way until Killick hustled him away into the Great Cabin, wrapping a blanket around his shoulders and pressing a cup of hot coffee into his hands as they went.

Padeen came running with lint and dressings, and grasped Stephen’s hand. He was wordless in his distress but weeping quite openly, his gentle face contorted with a mixture of relief and grief, and he patted Stephen’s arm again and again before leaving him to his coffee and his thoughts.

***

The tumbledown jail in which the few surviving Alcmenes had been confined had but a single storey standing. Underneath it, though, lay substantial cellars, and it was to these that Stephen and his medical colleague had been conducted by the deferential guards.

The first and largest cell formed a makeshift sick-berth for Heneage Dundas, who in his feverish state did not even recognise his old friend’s voice. The laudanum with which he had been dosed seemed to have confused his mind while doing little to ease the pain and inflammation of his injury. The wound was healing, however, and he would live. Stephen nodded his satisfaction, re-dressing the lesion with efficient speed and then indicating to his colleague that they should move on.

The next cell held an equally familiar figure. Philip Aubrey, pale and defiant and looking far less than his seventeen years, continued to stare out of the window for several seconds after his cell door was unlocked. Then he turned with a studied insolence that gave way instantly to a shocked recognition.

“Doctor M...” he began, and then caught Stephen’s glare. “Doctor, m-might you speak English?”

Stephen nodded curtly. The boy, like his half-brother, could clearly be quick enough when he needed to be. “A little,” he said, keeping his English simple and heavily accented for the guard’s benefit. “I see your wound now, yes?”

“Oh. Yes, sir.” Philip obediently unwrapped a soiled strip of cloth from his leg, exposing a small wound half scabbed-over with yellowish crusts.

Stephen tutted and turned to the guard. “I need clean hot water – hot, mind you, none of your tepid dishwater – and clean linen,” he said briskly, in his most Parisian French. “Now, if you please.”

They had a minute to speak openly, no more, before the guard returned with a kitchen maid bearing a bowl and cloth. Philip was even more pallid by then, and in the set of his mouth there was a dent where he was biting his lip hard.

Stephen took the cloth and cleaned the pus from the wound as gently as he could, binding it with fresh wrappings. “There, child,” he said. “A brave patient you are, very brave. Your family is proud of you, I think.” He made sure that Philip caught his eye; then he nodded once and followed the guard out of the cell before the boy’s tears could fall.

***

Jack returned to the Great Cabin after half an hour and slumped down on the locker under the stern-windows. Stephen took up the lint and bandages and went over to examine the laceration in Jack’s shoulder. It was clean, little more than a scrape, and looked fair to heal without stitches. Stephen took some time checking and cleaning it, however; he was waiting for questions, but none came and it seemed that none would. He bound the cut tightly, pulling the linen strip straight and pinning it in place.

“There. If you do not strain it, it may even heal without adding to your complement of scars,” he said. He looked up into Jack’s pale, hanging face, and paused for another minute to gather his thoughts before going on slowly, “I owe you an account, brother, and you shall have it, but I must beg your indulgence; please hear me out without interruptions. My mind is all confusion and I shall lose my thread, else. I did indeed manage to make contact with the local doctor, as I had hoped: one Jean Paget, an elderly man of unimpeachable reputation, if limited skill and ancient ideas, whose reading had ventured little beyond Paracelsus. Whether he believed the story that I was a Parisian physician en route to an affluent patient in La Rochelle I cannot say, but at all events he was pleased to accept my offer of assistance with the wounded foreigners most promptly. With his good name to back me, it was little matter to infiltrate the local prison, makeshift and undermanned as it was. There were few surviving officers from the _Alcmene_ , it seems, the fighting having been most ferocious and unrelenting – Heneage Dundas was one, and your brother Philip another, held in adjoining cells.”

He saw Jack about to interject, and held up his hand. “I spoke to Philip personally, under the pretext of inspecting and prescribing for a suppurating sore on his leg. You need not fear for that, Jack; the lesion was negligible and its treatment merely a pretext to gain me access. Dundas was more gravely injured, however, knocked down on his quarterdeck by chain-shot, and it appears from Philip’s account that his officers stood over him, protecting him until the _Alcmene_ could no longer swim and the surviving lieutenant ordered the colours to be struck. Poor George was amongst those officers, and Philip was not able... My dear Jack, I am so sorry to have to tell you that Philip was not able to save him. Philip and Dundas and the second lieutenant, a Mr Barwick, were held in that wreck of a prison until Dundas was judged safe to move. I tried to delay the matter as long as I could, urging further treatment, but Dr Paget was becoming agitated, and the outcome was inevitable in any case: yesterday the three of them were taken away with a guard of twenty men to Bitche.”

Jack had barely reacted to the news of his son’s death, his countenance remaining stony, but Stephen saw him flinch at the prison-fortress’ name; once locked up there, few men had ever been seen again.

“Philip might possibly have been retrieved, it is true,” Stephen continued, after a moment. “There may be no official exchange of prisoners at this stage in the war, but the French officers are not heartless, and might perhaps have winked at a tactfully-staged escape attempt on the part of a mere boy. He would not leave his captain, however, and I did not push the issue, no escape being without risk to anyone involved.”

“No,” said Jack, after the slightest pause. “No, you did right, brother. Sophie and the girls will be glad to hear that Philip has behaved with courage and honour. All of us, all the people will be proud to know that the heir of Woolcombe is a credit to our family and to the Navy.” Tears were running freely down his face now, and it was clear he could not bring himself to mention George.

Stephen struggled to formulate any phrase of comfort that would not sound trite or false, grating on his friend’s grief. He hesitated, and then, thinking of Padeen’s artless open display of affection and sorrow, he reached across and touched Jack’s arm.

Jack took his hand. “Nothing has changed,” he said. “Death to the French, death to the French, now more than ever, and damn us all as cowards if we flinch. We are under way already, did you know, Stephen? Orders came through from the Admiral this afternoon to rendezvous with the _Liffey_ , Captain Brigstock – a fast new frigate of forty guns, detached from the offshore squadron – and then to bear up for Quiberon Bay. God send we may intercept the squadron that attacked the _Alcmene,_ but with the _Liffey_ in company we can take on anything smaller than a ship of the line, and by God we shall sell our lives dearly. We shall continue, we shall fight, we shall do our duty, and there’s an end to it.”

Stephen nodded. The rhetoric of war had never made much impression on him, and denunciations of the French, a people dear to him of old, made even less, but Jack’s words carried the simple conviction of a man who would give his life to avenge his son, not because it was his duty but because there was no other course he would think of taking.

“We shall fight,” Stephen said quietly. “Bonaparte must be beaten; and Philip cannot be allowed to rot in Bitche.” He returned the pressure on Jack’s hand. “We shall fight, soul, and we shall win.”

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [St George's Day](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2429882) by [alltoseek](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alltoseek/pseuds/alltoseek)




End file.
